The Election Commission on Monday shifted out four senior police officers ahead of the sixth phase of elections in Bengal.
These officers include Nagendranath Tripathi the IPS officer who handled the Nandigram elections. He has been posted as Superintendant of Police Birbhum a districted ill-reputed for violence and political murders. He replaces Miraj Khalid. Birbhum SDPO Abhishek Roy has also been replaced with Nagaraj Devarakonda, OPS.
Incidentally TMC strongman and Birbhum district president Anubrata Mandal recently went on record saying that he did not rule out violence in the elections.
The other officers shifted are Asansol --- also a politically volatile place --- SP Sukesh Jain who has been replaced with Mitesh Jain. Similarly Burdwan East SP Bhaskhar Mukherjee has been replaced with Ajeet Kumar Singh IPS.
Meanwhile, even as political violence continued in Bengal the BJP candidate from Old Malda in North Bengal was shot at by unidentified miscreants on Sunday evening.
Saffron candidate Gopal Chandra Saha was shot at from close range and the bullet lodged inside his neck. The condition of the BJP leader was stated to be stable after the doctors at Malda Medical College conducted a two-and-half-hours’ surgery to extract the bullet. The BJP pointed fingers at the Trinamool Congress and staged road blockades even on Monday.
Elsewhere a BJP worker Akil Pramanik was found mysteriously hanging near his home at Kalyanpur village in Kalna sub-division of East Burdwan district. The party men alleged a TMC hand in his death alleging the local Trinamool leaders had been threatening him for thwarting attempted rigging by the TMC men during the fifth phase of polling on April 17.
TMC and BJP workers clashed elsewhere at Duttabad near Bidhanagar in north-eastern fringes of Kolkata too. Reports of violence also came in from parts of Nadia and South 24 Parganas.